Collection Report Feb 12, 2011

Bay View, Feb. 12. Even after a mini-thaw, this was a beach still held by winter's clutches.

1:15PM, 33 degrees, ~1 1/2 hrs past low tide

Surprisingly, this winter, for all its snowstorms, has brought little energy to the beach so far. We've had some extremely windy weather & even thundersnow. But ever since the Christmas storm, winds seem to have blown hard offshore as the tides approach. Waves have been low (the tide lines are several feet -- even yards -- below the level of last year's spring tides), and very little is either being tossed in or scoured back out.

December's flotsam: freed now, but undisturbed

No fresh lines of kelp, no other heavy detritus. Just old, dried, withered remnants of December -- and before. So, in a time of low ocean energy, what would a trip to the beach bring? First, Zone N:

64 finds:

• Building materials: 6 (4 chunks of asphalt, brick, part of asphalt roof shingle)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 0
• Fishing misc.: 36 (5 claw bands/scraps, 2 rope scraps, 29 trap coating scraps)
• Food-related plastics: 1 (gum)
• Food-related metal/glass: 0
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 16 (inc. tire-tread scrap, 2 bottle caps, umbrella base, caulk, hairband, tieback, 2 o-rings, bandaid)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 3
• Paper/wood: 2 (wooden handle, fence slat)
• Misc./unique: 0

Pretty much the normal spread. Dominated as usual by fishing debris, mostly scraps of the vinyl coating of lobster traps, ripped apart as the metal underneath rusts. (See "Ex Uno, Plures.") The piece of tread seemed odd. My hunch is that it's from an old waste tire used as a boat bumper, but that's just a guess.

Oh, and why list chewing gum as a food plastic? Because that's what chewing gum is. It's plastic: polyvinyl acetate and/or polyethylene, to name just a couple potential ingredients. All part of our plastic world.

On to Zone S:

47 finds:

• Building materials: 10 (asphalt chunks)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 0
• Fishing misc.: 22 (3 rope scraps, 2 claw bands, 17 trap coatings)
• Food-related plastics: 1 (fork tine)
• Food-related metal/glass: 0
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 13 (inc. bottle cap, duct tape, silly band, tiedown, o-ring)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 0
• Paper/wood: 1 (fence slat)
• Misc./unique: 0

More of the usual. Except for a bunch of small asphalt chunks this time. Maybe freeze/thaw shattered one big one? Don't know. As with Zone N, nothing really worthy of a close-up.

So that's about it for this week. This report sheds little light by itself. But it builds on what's come before. And it's a reminder that even a sleeping shoreline is still invaded every week by things that don't belong.

The ocean doesn't forget

Collection Report Jan 6, 2011

Happy New Year!

After the "Christmas Storm," the weather of Dec. 30 - Jan. 6 was uneventful. What would it be flotsam-wise? It didn't take long to find out. For starters, any beach that looks like this...

Organic mush recording a receding tide

...will contain plenty of this:

Glove for scale, lines point to plastic debris in situ
along just one small section

Plus, this withered & sunbleached menu suggested that Mother Nature was still in the midst of serious detox.

Withered & sunbleached, but intact, because
it's coated in plastic!

What's the big deal about a seaside restaurant menu lost in the sea? Because The Pier Restaurant is (or was - it seems to be defunct now) in Bar Harbor, 125 miles to the northeast.

Anyway, the previous week I collected 478 finds from my utterly deserted, frozen beach. I was hoping that would come back down a bit this week. Did it? Here's Zone N:

360 finds:

• Building materials: 0
• Foam/Styrofoam: 0
• Fishing misc.: 94 (35 claw bands, 2 band fragments, 35 bits of rope, 20 lobster trap coatings, bead, bumper)
• Food-related plastics: 58 (28 bottlecap seals, 13 silverware scraps, 6 polystyrene (#6) cup scraps, 7 random cup scraps, slotted spoon, 2 sauce packs, label scrap)
• Food-related metal/glass: 7 (can + can scraps)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 187 (everything, just... everything)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 3 (2 cigarettes plus wrapper)
• Paper/wood: 1
• Misc./unique: 10 (6 fabric scraps, 2 bits of cord, 2 other)

As with last week, no commentary needed here. Just a few pictures will do:

The confetti of life

The day of the bottle-cap seal;
and how does a slotted spoon get lost?

Another Jul 19 tag?!

Some of the fishing rope is very old

And then down to Zone S:

136 finds:

• Building materials: 0
• Foam/Styrofoam: 1
• Fishing misc.: 52 (12 claw bands, 21 rope scraps, 18 lobster trap coatings, shell wadding)
• Food-related plastics: 13 (2 bottlecaps, 2 #6 cup scraps, 3 bread tags, knife, wrapper bit, sauce pack, 3 scraps)
• Food-related metal/glass: 4 (can scraps)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 54 (inc. weatherstrip, tent rod segment, duct tape, shovel fragment, Clorox cap, 2 bits of red/white/black vinyl scraps like those found in Zone N last week)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 4
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 8 (glove, 4 fabric scraps, 1 hand warmer, 2 bits of string/cord)

Even in winter Zone S stays lighter than Zone N. Does this mean Zone N's waters are filled with remnants of busy summers, slowly regurgitated back in winter? Does it mean that the micro-currents around Zone S lend themselves to less garbage? The shore at Zone S is a bit narrower than Zone N - does that matter? Don't know -- but I'm working on it. I do know that the kinds of debris at both are very similar. Here's a few closeups:

Zone S's colorful confetti

Mmmm, toxins

And much more fishing debris

Including this ancient piece; yes, that
furry loop has a heart of rope

And there you go. The find count did come down. From 478 finds to 476.

In two weeks in the heart of winter on a quiet Maine beach, I've plucked up nearly 1,000 pieces of manmade garbage. Along 500 feet of tideline. Some may be remnants of summer's revelry; some has clearly washed in from many miles away. And it just keeps coming.

A parting thought for this week. I pulled up 242 pieces of fishing debris in the past two weeks. What's missing from this picture?

Surf, Isle, ...

That's right, fishing buoys, fishing boats, fishermen. To the edge of the horizon at Saco Bay I have never seen a buoy, trawler, lobster boat. There is no commercial scale fishing in Saco Bay as far as my eye can make out.

To reach my shore, each claw band, shotgun wadding, coating from a ruined trap, or fragment of rope has to travel for miles. When you think about the vastness of the Gulf of Maine, and the tiniest of my bit of shoreline, each scrap in my hand is an impossibility -- it's hitting PowerBall. If I've hit PowerBall this many times, how much else is still out there?

The tie that binds?

Commercial fishing is the lifeblood for much of Maine. In 2000, the state granted some 18,000 harvesting licenses. About $336 million in seafood was landed in that year alone.

So it's little surprise that the detritus of commercial fishing washes up on local shores. But I was surprised by the amount. By any measure -- number of items, volume, weight -- the refuse of commercial fishing outstripped any other material I was collecting.

March 8:

March 19:

Trawler rope, line, netting, shellfish baskets -- if claw bands were a big business, fishing rope is a juggernaut. Google "fishing rope" and you get 10,000 hits. Almost all of it is now made of nylon, polypropylene, and other plastics that don't biodegrade. It all lives a hard -- and short -- life. And obviously much simply ends up shredded underwater or tossed overboard, then rides the currents wherever they lead. (It's a phenomenon documented on beaches around the world.)

Plus, it easily tangles with marine plants. Almost every clump of kelp that I picked through had rope, or thin, nearly invisible fishing line, hopelessly knotted up within it.

And of course this raises a slew of new questions -- does the rope/line actually help bind the kelp and clump it together? If so, is that a bad thing? Are there organisms who eat kelp and ingest rope fragments too? If so, is it harmful? And the organisms that bind to the ropes -- are they helpful or harmful when they hitch a ride? Does the rope sink and roll along the ocean floor til hitting shore -- or does it float and swirl near the surface?

Then there's the elephant in the room -- was all this fishing flotsam a one-off, or is it pervasive up and down the coast? Is it the unavoidable price of maintaining an industry that drives so much of my state's economy, and very way of life?